Aphasia researchers from Chicago, Virginia, and Louisiana have collaborated on a study of the structures and strategies employed by persons with aphasia (PWA), and their neurotypical communication partners, during text messaging. The current investigators apply the investigative framework developed originally for Conversation Analysis of verbal face-to-face communications, later usefully applied to analyze also texting communications.
The purposes of this retrospective study are to illustrate how – and with what degree of success – PWA and their texting partners work to co-construct successful transactional and interactional communicative sessions in the texting environment. For these purposes, the investigators retrospectively analyzed naturally occurring text exchanges culled from phones of participating PWA.
Eight PWA comprise the subject sample of this study. They ranged from roughly 38 – 73 year in age, from in time post-stroke from roughly half a year to 8 years. All but one had a non-fluent aphasia, and their mean Aphasia Quotient was 63.3. Their mean WAB-R Writing subscore was 61.6. Participants permitted investigators to review a week’s texting histories on their smart phones to identify communicative sequences of interest. The researchers videotaped their activities while scrolling through text histories in the initial search. Researchers then transcribed the video portions of interest for CA analysis, capturing identifying initials of contacts, words, emojis, multimedia content such as photographs and website links, and associated timestamps whenever available. The investigators subsequently conducted cyclical reviews of the texting exchange transcripts, focusing on communicative structures and strategies that are widely documented in the Conversation Analysis literature.
The analysis confirms that key elements – structures and strategies – are identifiable in these texting exchanges. They include topic negotiation – the process by which texting partners strive to converge on a current topic of discussion – along with sequential organization participants’ contributions, and shared awareness of communicative breakdowns in conjunction with strategies to repair breakdowns. The study highlights some of the ways that PWA utilize extra-linguistic materials to accomplish their goals: sending contextually rich photographs to help establish topic (e.g., daughter’s birthday) rather than producing text, or sending a link to a Website to suggest restaurants of interest. The analyses also include examples of failures – to establish topic, for example, as illustrations of what that looks like, and what the source of difficulty is.
•For further reading: J. H. Azios, J. B. Lee, L. R. Cherney. 2023, Conversation analysis of texting exchanges in aphasia. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 32(5S): 2512–2527. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_AJSLP-22-00303